Burn What Will Burn (15 page)

Tammy Fay snored softly. Sweat sheened her upper lip.

My beat-up Ford pickup was still hooked and hanging by a thick steel thread from her tow truck.

Her head was tilted back on the bench seat. On the shotgun side floorboard was a stuffed-tight army-green duffel bag with glossy fashion and pulp
True Story
magazines piled atop it. A corner of a red leather suitcase poked from under a tarp on the tow truck's rear bed.

Tammy Fay's swollen lips were cracked and parted. I touched a fingerend to her bottom lip and she stirred, opened her puffy eyes.

I put the finger in my mouth, tasted salt and spit and cigarettes, savored the smell of her hair, of grease and oil and sweet skin.

She stretched. When she shook her hair out I saw the golden wedding band on the gold-link chain around her neck.

“You surprised me, Bob. I just came out to bring…”

I walked toward the back of the house.

“I just came to bring your truck back,” she said. “Preacher Pickens called me to tow it, but I just towed it here instead of into town.”

Those logistics did not sound likely.

I didn't turn around, just kept walking.

On the slab patio Stank was facing off with one of Jake Wells's sheep, squared nose to nose with a big ewe.

“Get her, Stank,” I said.

The sheep bolted at the sound of my voice and the dog chased after her, well as the dog could on three legs, limping into the back field.

I mounted the steps, stopped on the back porch to grab a couple of beers out of the refrigerator, opened the screen door, switched on the kitchen lights against the darkness, let the screen door slam shut behind me.

I plugged the drain of one side of the double basin kitchen sink and filled it half full with cold tap water, dipped my dirty T-shirt into the water, soaked it loaded, squeezed it empty over my head. I screwed the cap off a beer and took a long draught, pulled the soggy stick-it note from Motel 6 out of the pocket of the wet T-shirt, reread the information there.

Leo King, 483 Babcock St., Arkadelphia, Arkansas.

An engine started up, the winch whined, but I didn't look out the kitchen window. I killed the beer, went to the front porch and checked on my chickens. Malcolm had fed them but I changed their fouled water. I returned inside, went into the bathroom and took a long, chilling shower, scrubbed myself, from head to toe with lye soap and a rough loofah, washed myself until I squeaked. Cleaned my fingernails, between my toes, every little nook and cranny of me, until I was clean as a whistle.

I figured Tammy Fay was gone.

Naked, I padded barefooted back into the kitchen for the other beer I'd left on the counter.

From the back porch the distinctive sound of a Zippo lighter unhinged with a
clink!

Tammy Fay's face, behind the warped screen of the back door, was briefly illuminated as she lit a cigarette with a green G. I. issued Zippo. Her features were raised up and hollowed out by that small flame, the lines on her face, around her deep-set eyes, around her wide mouth, on her broad forehead, were grooved and deeper than I had seen them before.

She blew smoke through the screen between us. I put the beer down on the countertop.

“Hey,” she said. “You. Bob.”

I went to her straight as a divining rod to deep buried water. She put a hand against mine to hold it there on the screen and I could feel her palm hot through the wire mesh, feel her skin. Water dripped off my spine and a breeze went past us both, from outside to inside and it chilled me to a shiver.

She closed her eyes and pressed her lips together, dropped her hand from the screen and let me push the door open to her. I stepped onto the porch and put my hand on her face, open against her cheek, and she leaned into my hand and kissed my palm. That hand quaked and moved down her long neck, traced a line over the tanned triangle below her chin, fingered the zipper of her coveralls where her flesh was soft and encaved, hollow at the base of her throat, soft. I took hold of that zipper and dragged it down, over the gold chain, over the gold ring, between her breasts and to the cleft of her legs.

She was naked underneath.

The cigarette slipped from between her fingers, discharged sparks against my bare feet, burned my skin.

She bit her lower lip and swayed slightly backward and then leaned into me, took my hand and guided it to her breast, put her mouth on my neck and bit into me.

“Tammy…,” I said because that was pretty much it for me at that moment, just her.

She bit my lip, drew blood.

“Shut up,” she warned.

She dragged me down the back steps, to the garden where the dirt was crusty dry on top and wet underneath. Her coveralls were now undone to her waist and my mouth fell to her breasts, to her nipples, and she moaned and fell back on the dirt as I worked the coveralls off her, explored her skin, felt the scars on her arms and the scars on her back and ass, as I buried my face in her and tasted her, smelled her like the dirt. My tongue, my fingers tested her to the curved bone, drew a dry, hoarse scream.

In the back field a dog howled and a sheep bleated and the woman's breath rattled as she pulled me up on her, into her and forced her teeth into my shoulder.

Blood ran and her nails on my back were a rake. I augured into her and she moaned very loud as they do in pornographic films. The sky above us was distant and vaulted and, to me, there was nobody in the world but us for a moment.

Lights flashed, a star exploded and a hot breeze blew over the garden, to shake loose seeds from the fibrous, dried-out pods of okra. She dug her hands into my ass, raised her knees and pulled me deep, yelled, “Hard!”

I tried to be hard.

“Hard! Hard! Hard!”

Like that was not just a request but a statement of fact and meant something about the world maybe but nothing much, really, about me, Bob Reynolds, at all.

And then she shivered and cried out again, moaned and wrapped her long legs around my waist, her long arms around my ribs and crushed me to her, opened her eyes, finally, and looked at me, commanded,

“Come in me now.”

And I did, like I hadn't for a very long time.

*   *   *

She pushed me off, gathered up her discarded work boots her coveralls, went inside.

A minute later the shower came on and she screamed curses because there's no hot water in my house, just very cold water from a very deep artesian well.

*   *   *

It was several minutes before I realized I was being watched.

Leaning on the hood of Tammy Fay's tow truck Warnell Ames, Miss Ollie's son, snickered.

A camera light flashed and he took another picture of me.

*   *   *

She was standing in the kitchen, dressed in one of my white dress shirts, a pair of clean chinos cinched round her waist with my favorite necktie. It was the tie, red silk with a neat print of yellow, I'd worn for my momma's funeral and many years later for my own wedding.

A good necktie is a good investment.

Her boots were in one hand, a beer in the other. A cigarette dangled from a pouty lip.

I walked past her and into the bedroom where her dirty coveralls were tossed atop my dirty clothes pile. I dressed in a pair of cleaned and pressed chinos and a fresh-from-the-package white T-shirt, antifungal socks and one of my many pairs of sensible walking shoes, then returned to the kitchen.

She was leaning over the sink, staring through the screen into the sideyard.

“Warnell! You idiot, get the hell out of the driver's seat!”

“Warnell's not exactly a credible witness,” I said. “Or a dependable accomplice.”

She turned, leaned her ass against the counter, dropped her boots on the floor, dragged on her unfiltered coffin nail.

“You cannot even imagine, Bob.” She sighed, blew out smoke. “Warnell doesn't even know how to drive a fucking car. Which has made things pretty complicated of late. But I do have a tow truck. And Warnell is big and strong. And faithful as a stupid dog. Has been forever.” Tammy Fay seemed to reconsider her sidekick. “Actually Warnell, he's pretty handy. Idiot Warnell ties up loose ends pretty good, him just being him and being so faithful to me and all. He surely does.”

“It's surprising what people can accomplish when you take full advantage of them,” I suggested. “People can downright surprise you when you pressure them enough,” I said.

“You take what you can get and work things out, don't you, Bob?”

“I suppose you do,” I agreed. I had.

“Anyway a picture's worth the word of a thousand idiots, right, Bob? And the best insurance a girl like me can get is photographic evidence.” She looked at me sideways. “Besides, do you think anyone wouldn't believe you fucked me if you had the chance? That you wouldn't be my sugar daddy if I let you? That you wouldn't do anything for me if you were my little john? Any crazy thing at all, Bob?”

These were more rhetorical questions, so I didn't answer them.

“You're smart enough to understand all this, aren't you Bob?” she asked me.

I wasn't sure if I was or if I wasn't.

“I don't care what everybody says about you, Bob. You are not the crazy stupid guy people think you are. You are actually pretty smart, aren't you, Bob?”

I said nothing to that backhanded compliment that damned me with faint praise, considering the local intelligence level.

“So?” she asked me. “What?”

The “so what” seemed to be (as far as I could ascertain it on available information) that in the very recent past Joe Pickens Junior had been hiding on the creek side of The Little Piney (with his son, Malcolm provisioning him) and Joe Pickens Junior had witnessed Warnell and Tammy Fay dumping Buck King's body into The Little Piney (for whatever reason they had to do that and on whatever day at whatever time, I didn't know), then Warnell (or Tammy Fay herself, though that seemed less likely) had probably also shot and killed Joe Pickens Junior, in order to eliminate Joe Pickens Junior as a witness (who might want to trade such eyewitness testimony about a murder one for a plea bargain on his own dope-dealing rap).

The timetable was hard to figure, but Buck was drowned sometime shortly after I coshed him unconscious. And then Joe Pickens Junior had probably been killed (and reported by Warnell, which seemed highly unlikely, but there it was) while I was in jail.

But I wasn't going to ask Tammy Fay if this was how it had played out.

She would tell me what she wanted me to know and would not confess to anything she did not want to confess to. If she needed to implicate me in Buck's death or if she needed to pin Joe Pickens Junior's death on me, then she would try to do that. She would not hesitate to make me her scapegoat if I was the best option. That was plain.

“Poor Bob. Everybody in town knows you sit over there on Elm Street in the morning with your big ol' binoculars and your little old dick, jerking off in your truck behind Miss Ollie's azalea bushes. Even poor Miss Ollie knows you're obsessed with me,” Tammy Fay said. She looked at me like as a dead catfish ready for the fishnet. “Stalker, is what you are, Bob. And everybody around here knows that because I have told everybody about it and even have pictures of you doing it. Poor Bob, jerking off in his truck when I open up my morning curtains for him.”

“And you knew I was over there all this time, across the street from the Old Lion?” I asked. “Watching you. You never said anything to me about it.”

“You never saw much, did you, Bob?” she asked.

“Just enough to keep watching,” I remembered.

“I always thought you might wind up being useful for something, Bob,” she said. “Though I also always knew I might have to let you come inside me to make you that useful.”

I nodded.

“Well, Bob, was it as good with me as you always imagined?”

“Yes,” I admitted.

Why not admit it?

“I didn't feel much myself, Bob. A guy like you can't really fuck a girl like me, can he?”

She said that without rancor, without much interest really, casually, as an ethnographic observation almost, which made it even worse.

But she said it. And it hurt me.

But I nodded.

She smiled, picked up the soggy stick-it note from Motel 6, smoothed it out on the countertop, exhaled through her nose.

“Oh Buck,” she said to the sticky note. “I'm going to miss a real man's good hard fucking, you bastard.”

She raised an eyebrow at me, baiting me though my rising was over with her.

“Husband?” I asked.

She ripped the note into shreds and stuffed the shreds into the drain of the sink, stuffed in her cigarette after them and ran some cold water over them.

“Why, Bob Reynolds, Buck King was an old man, just like you. Not quite old enough to be my daddy in the regular world, but he did not miss it by much.”

“Was he your daddy?”

She moved her head. Her long hair was wet along the edges.

“Not in any biological sense,” she said. She looked pensive then or something other than cruel. “I have had a lot of daddies, Bob. And Buck used to pretend he was Daddy sometimes. When I was especially naughty. But generally he was more the husband type, even though we never actually could get legally married since he's already married, has been since high school to his prom queen sweetheart.” Tammy Fay laughed, sarcastically I thought, and touched the jewelry on her neck. “We traded rings though. A long time ago.”

She touched the gold band chained around her neck, the one I had taken off the neck of the dead man from the creek, from around Buck's thick, red neck and that the High Sheriff of Poe County had taken back from me and given to Tammy Fay—the industrious black widow in my great big rural route mailbox could not have constructed a more elaborate web. And with the exact same amount of consciousness.

“I see,” I said. And I did see. I thought, at least, that I understood a good bit now.